I made this mod, to boost the sound effect volume in Final Fantasy 8 VIII steam edition. As you may know, the music is quite loud in this game and the sound effects are quite low volume. First of I installed roses and wine mod, great mod btw, and you can control the volume of the music with the vol=xx file in the game directory. I lowered the vol=50 and still the sound effects were not quite loud enough for me, I like to hear the gunblade hit, GF effects etc, loudly because it is more immersive. So why modify the sound effects, why not just lower the music vol=30 and then turn up your speakers? Well because for me, this introduced some constant noise into the audio like a faint background hum, perhaps it is my speakers or realtek sound card IDK.

Sound effects probably twice as loud now. I checked alot of the files before amplifying and they had low volumes for the most part. Plenty of room to amplify. There may be a few of the loudest ones that got distorted because I allowed clipping in Audacity. If this is an issue I can easily re-encode with allow clipping disabled.

Installing this mod - highlight your original audio.dat and audio.fmt located in FF8\data\sound, and back them up using winrar, 7zip or whatever. Then open the mod .7z file and drag the new versions of the files over to that directory and overwrite. Be sure you backed up the originals in case you want to revert to them.

I recommend roses and wine with vol=50. Also in game, you can select config from the menu and adjust the sound effects volume (it is at 100% at default, so you can probably only lower it). As stated Sound effect volume is all relative to the music volume..

=) cheers

took down, GF sounds were distorted =\ . Also sound effects not of good quality and harsh to hear loud repeatedly...gf sounds start in the 9000's and if you open in audacity you will see they are all the way to 0db

I am looking for an index of sounds, particularly I need to know the ID for the draw sound effect, summon sound effects particularly quezacotl, as I need to check the files for clipping. Maybe someone has an index of these? Already tried to google it. Thanks

It's almost definitely interference of your audio equipment. Usually from poor shielding. Sometimes just because you haven't muted certain line inputs. Lowering audio will be perfectly fine for most people. I can lower it to 1% and there is no hum. Also 30% is definitely the wrong balance. The music will have sounded louder than that on PSX.

I'm pretty happy with it, but I agree it's not needed if you just lower the music volume and turn up the speakers... yeah I have some logitech speakers for pc pretty cheap... The music has always been loud in this game comparatively